U are what U seek: new play sparked by AOL search query leak

What kind of person searches for both "pink camellia" and "cut into your …

When AOL released "anonymized" search results from more than 500,000 users back in 2006, the resulting firestorm even blew into the mainstream media, which managed to track down and identify some of the "anonymous" users simply from their search queries. Now, two years later, a seedling emerges from those ashes as a Philadelphia theater company launches USER 927, a new play based on one user's rather unorthodox set of queries. Ars spoke to writer Katharine Clark Gray about the piece and what led her to create it.

From flowers to forced rape porn

A play about search queries might sound as enjoyable as listening to Winnie Ille Pu read entirely in Latin (I speak from experience), but AOL user 927 was no ordinary searcher. The Consumerist picked 927's queries from the complete archive and published them online in 2006, which inspired director Michael Alltop to pitch Gray on the idea of doing "a play about it."

The queries start harmlessly enough. Sure, user 927 has some medical problems ("heal time for broken legs," "human mold," "mold on humans," "skin mold") but who has the time these days to keep themselves entirely fungi-free?

But things quickly take a turn for the worse with the sudden appearance of "dog sex" at 9:28 PM one evening. Half an hour later, the queries are about flowers ("anemona," "arbutus," "aster," "pink camellia"), which lasts until 2 AM the next morning, and all appears well again. The following day, "forced rape porn" makes an appearance. "Testicle festivals" follows soon after. "Hentai pedofilia," "bdsm electricity," and "tormented elmo" (?) are entered. Things go downhill from there, getting downright unprintable (let's just say that incest, torture, and urine are involved), until we run across the not-amusing-at-all "cut into your trachea."

Seriously, who is this person?

The play's the thing

That's the question that inspired Gray as she worked on drafts. What are the "secrets that people contain in their search logs," she wondered, and what do they say about us? The play began as a set of four interlocking narratives from four users, but in the end was stripped down to a single story that Gray calls "cyber-noir."

In USER 927, a mother and a young daughter move from Brooklyn to the small town of Osterville, Indiana, and the mother declares an analog-only summer. Her daughter, bored out of her mind, turns to the Internet for friendship in a play that "takes a provocative look at the nature of search in the Internet era, and the dangers that seem to spring from every click of the mouse."

But it's not just digital searching that features in the play; Gray says half of the piece is about "what we look for without computers," and she's curious about the juxtaposition of the really creepy with the really normal. In some ways, search may be the most honest thing about people, an idea inspired in part by coming across John Battelle's book The Search in a used book store.

Gray doesn't want to give too much away, but she does make clear that user 927's actual queries form a part of the play. As for trying to figure out the person behind those queries, Gray has given up on that. "Your choice on whether it was one person or several people is as individual as people's take on religion," she says.

User 927 may in fact be multiple people; it might be someone conducting a strange form of research. From the outside, without context, we have no real idea, perhaps indicating that constructing a profile from a set of queries, even quite idiosyncratic ones, is more difficult than it might at first appear.

"We're probably on several government watch lists right now," Gray (half?) jokes. In the course of crafting the play, she and her husband (who produced the two screens of video material that will run simultaneously with the live production) made most of the same queries as user 927 and visited many of the sites that they dredged up from the Internet's darkest corners. Who knows? Maybe user 927 was doing the same thing.